


Phoenix

by RosieWazlib



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Marauders, Marauders' Era, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-07 17:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11627931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosieWazlib/pseuds/RosieWazlib
Summary: She had promised herself, many months earlier when she first felt the tugs of longing deep within her, that she would never love James Potter, but love him she did, and loving him was the beginning of everything.





	1. Into Flames

**_Phoenix _  
**

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.  
\- Virginia Woolf, _Mrs Dalloway_

* * *

1969 was the year of the Summer of Love and that year that Lily Evans informed her sister that on her eighteenth birthday she would be moving to San Francisco to join the peace movement. This news, as real a revelation as anything else Lily had experienced in her life thus far, seemed unimpressive to her sister, who did not look up from her book. That night the sisters had crawled into their beds as they had every other night of their lives and drifted to sleep, as Cokeworth lay beyond the windows of their parents' house, silent and innocuous and empty while a war raged across the sea.

Lily Evans had dreamt of San Francisco and Greenwich Village and Havana. Lily Evans wanted to learn to meditate in India like the Beatles and grow her hair to her hips. She wanted to live in a squat in Haight-Ashbury and march through Washington and she wanted to end the war. She wanted to fall in love over and over again and travel to every corner of the earth with a man she adored and who adored her in return, but she would never marry or have children or be anything but free.

But Lily Evans would never do any of that. Her hair never passed her elbows and in her lifetime she only fell in love once. She married at the age of nineteen and became a mother at twenty. In her brief, terrible and immaculate twenty-one years on this earth she never left the United Kingdom.

By 1978, the Summer of Love was gone and the war was over and Lily Evans no longer saw freedom in the bohemian squalor of cities she would never visit but instead in something glistening in the future of the long life the world was promising her, but the path to which was blocked for her by this a new war that was no longer known to her through pictures on the television set but in the slurs of _Mudblood_ hissed at her from across classrooms.

And perhaps, as time went on and her bones turned to dust beside the man she loved, when days of dreaming of San Francisco were long passed and the eyes of history would turn to her and scholars would write the name of her child in their books, there would be some knowledge – some legend – that the long ago promise she had given to her sister would realise itself, and perhaps she would, indeed, end the war.

Of all the promises she had made to herself in her short, little life she had never expected that to be the one she would keep. Time, she knew, had a habit of breaking promises, not fulfilling them.

She had promised herself war and all its advocates were and always would be sinners, but by eighteen she was first and foremost a soldier. She had promised herself she would never raise her wand on a person, but raising a wand became the difference between life and death. She had promised herself, many months earlier when she first felt the tugs of longing deep within her, that she would never love James Potter, but love him she did, and loving him was the beginning of everything, because if she had not begun to break these promises the war would have raged on long after her body went into the earth, and the first of these promises was broken on the 25th of May 1978 when she agreed to a date with James Potter.

The 25th of May 1978 was a warm night and a gleaming moon hung in the sky, light streaming through the high stain-glassed windows and casting the two Gryffindors in squares of colour. He was looking at her in a way she had never seen her do so before, hazel eyes luminous in the moonlight, his dark face set in a copper hue.

He cleared the lump in his throat to break the silence. 'I mean, you probably have plans, but just if you've got a free moment…'

'No,' she replied in a voice she hoped, but doubted, sounded even. 'No, I don't have any plans – none.'

He stared at her and said nothing, and she did nothing but stare back. She wondered if there was any feasible possibility that his heart was beating as quickly as her own.

'No plans at all?' he asked her. 'Wow, little miss popularity, you are.'

She smiled, and he smiled, and they continued to gaze at the other. 'Shut up, Potter. And I suppose you have an action packed Saturday planned.'

'You know me too well. But seriously, if you want to, then I want to.'

'I want to,' she assured him and she looked away, dropping his gaze, hoping that in the dim light her blushing cheeks would not betray her. 'I think we best get back upstairs.'

'Ever the practical one,' he remarked, as they started back down the corridor.

The walk back to Gryffindor tower was shrouded in a heavy silence that seemed thick enough to touch, the moon gleaming with an unearthly luminescence, the chill of the soundless corridors somehow soothing. James Potter walked beside her and her heart was pounding. She had broken her promise, and every cell in her body was screaming with infidelity. Blood coursed through her veins in sacrilege, her unfaithful lungs struggled to keep her breathing even.

 _In and out, in and out,_ her heart was whispering. _You're going on a date with James Potter. In and out, in and out._

Breaking that promise, she thought as she climbed through the portrait hole, felt sweet on her tongue, and the world felt electric beneath her fingertips.

'Night, Evans,' he said to her at the foot of the stairs that led up to the girl's dormitory.

'Goodnight, Potter.'

Perhaps, she thought as she climbed their stairs to her dormitory, she had just started something that she wouldn't be able to end. Breaking that promise, she had no way of knowing, had started something that wouldn't end for many, many years, and was the beginning of the end of her waning lifetime.


	2. Heart

**_Phoenix_ **

His madness was not of the head, but heart.  
\- Lord Byron, _Lara_

* * *

'We're going to die.'

This was a phrase that James Potter used often, but he very rarely meant it. The world didn't have the nerve to kill them, as Sirius would often reply when faced with one of the many and frequent predicaments they found themselves in that swung much too far towards death-defying for the comfort of the common man.

Seven years of broken limbs courtesy of the whomping willow and minutes without breath when swimming in the lake resulted in being dragged under by some dark and terrible creature and long bouts of incapacity from duelling in the school corridors had numbed in the four of them to what was so fine-tuned in their more sensible peers; their instinct to survive.

Was it possible that the stubborn, thumping muscle in each of their chests had willed itself through so many moments when it threatened to stop that it no longer faltered under the same tests as other hearts? Was it possible that that dark, hidden cells in their brains responsible for a fear of death had endured such thorough exposures that they had somehow shrivelled into disconnect when in other minds they thrived so well?

It wasn't until the age of eighteen that James knew, truly and deeply and fully, what it was to fear death. It wasn't until he looked upon the three boys who flanked him, brothers bound not by blood but by nerve, and saw three souls on the verge of annihilation.

'We're going to die.'

'Perhaps,' said Peter.

'Probably,' said Remus, and they had raised their wands.

James Potter knew little of war until he was eighteen years old, which in a world more perfect than ours would be far too young for a soul to know anything of war. He had once deafened himself to any mention of the war, blinded himself to newspaper headings, because how could a being such as James Potter look upon injustice and be at peace in his complacency?

He had once lived and breathed in hell and fire and sin, but by his nineteenth birthday he was living on borrowed time and a razor's edge.

 _Will it be today?_ he would ask himself as he threw himself towards death. _Let me have another day._

But these other days were limited and death rushed to meet him, swarmed upon him and his lover and his brothers and their allies. They dropped like flies in the closing days of the war, one after the other, and James Potter made his peace with his demise, because he had had years to train for it.

How cruel the world was that his fate had been sealed only after he had begun living, only after he had known love and a child and how Lily Evans tasted on his tongue. Cruel the world was that the day he sealed his fate was the day he knew he needed her. Cruel the world was that the day he knew he needed her was the day he knew he would be fighting until his last breath. Cruel the world was that on the 26th of May 1978 James Potter would find himself drinking with Ted Tonks and he would know that his days of complacency were over.

* * *

**A/N: This was posted on my FF account ages ago but I'm still very slowly trying to move myself over to ao3, so here's another chapter!**

**As always, thank you so much for reading! xx**


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